The Shadow of the Object Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known

In The Shadow of the Object, Christopher Bollas integrates aspects of Freud?s theory of unconscious thinking with elements from the British Object Relations School. In doing so, he offers radical new visions of the scope of psychoanalysis and expands our understanding of the creativity of the unconscious mind and the aesthetics of human character.

During our formative years, we are continually "impressed" by the object world. Most of this experience will never be consciously thought, and but it resides within us as assumed knowledge. Bollas has termed this "the unthought known", a phrase that has ramified through many realms of human exploration, including the worlds of letters, psychology and the arts.

Aspects of the unthought known --the primary repressed unconscious --will emerge during a psychoanalysis, as a mood, the aesthetic of a dream, or in our relation to the self as other. Within the unique analytic relationship, it becomes possible, at least in part, to think the unthought -- an experience that has enormous transformative potential.

Published here with a new preface by Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object remains a classic of the psychoanalytic literature, written by a truly original thinker.

Preface to the 2017 Edition

Introduction

I THE SHADOW OF THE OBJECT

1 The transformational object

2 The spirit of the object as the hand of fate

3 The self as object

4 At the other’s play: to dream

5 The trisexual

II MOODS

6 Moods and the conservative process

7 Loving hate

8 Normotic illness

9 Extractive introjection

III COUNTERTRANSFERENCE

10 The liar

11 The psychoanalyst and the hysteric

12 Expressive uses of the countertransference

13 Self analysis and the countertransference

14 Ordinary regression to dependence

IV EPILOGUE

15 The unthought known: early considerations

Christopher Bollas is a Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytical Research.